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Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: The Miller-Urey Experiment
Michael Behe’s “First Rule of Adaptive Evolution” Could Undermine the Evolution of Functional Coding Elements
After reviewing the effects of mutations upon Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs), Michael Behe’s recent review article in Quarterly Review of Biology, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” offers some conclusions. In particular, as the title suggests, Behe introduces a rule of thumb he calls the “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: “Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment Read More ›
NCSE’s Program Director Josh Rosenau: Human Dependency Obviates the Right to Life
National Center for Selling Evolution Science Education’ s Program and Policy Director Josh Rosenau has made disturbing arguments in favor of abortion. On his personal blog Thoughts from Kansas, Rosenau, who has been a doctoral candidate in evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, asserted that children in the womb were nearly indistinguishable from… cancer. Later in his post, Rosenau defends abortion by asserting: Is an embryo a discrete human being? I think not. An embryo is dependent on its living host… An old-fashioned term for the “living host” of an embryo is… mother. Rosneau frames the mother-child relationship charmingly: he compares the relationship between a mother and her unborn child to the relationship between a host and a parasite. Read More ›
Science and Worldviews: Slate Sees the Light
Slate — yes, stet that, Slate — carries an excellent essay opening up the interesting question of whether political and philosophical presuppositions distort what we think of as mainstream science (“Lab Politics: Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That’s a problem“). Author Daniel Sarewitz notes that among scientists, self-identified Republicans make up a dismal 6 percent, while Democrats are 55 percent (the rest are independents and I-don’t-knows). Though Sarewitz doesn’t mention evolution, he ought to have done so. But never mind. While folks on the political right have been strangely slow to pick up on the political resonances of Darwinism, his illustration from the climate debate makes the same point: Could it be that disagreements over climate change are Read More ›
Arsenic and Old News
The media has been buzzing about NASA’s claim that scientists that have discovered “life as we do not know it” (MSNBC)–purportedly finding bacteria that can use arsenic instead of phosphorous in its DNA. David Klinghoffer already blogged about this story here, interviewing astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez (who has conducted research on astrobiology) on the find. The public first became aware of this story last week when NASA announced it would be holding a press conference that would reveal “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” NASA’s announcement inspired a chorus of speculative excitement among materialists and UFO true-believers alike, who stated things like: NASA is holding a press conference on Thursday to make an announcement. Read More ›